I think this has to have a place somewhere among my favourites – I could really watch it any time. If for nothing else, it’s worth seeing for the car chases. People will argue that William Friedkin has done countless better, and of course Bullitt and others … but these have to be my personal favourite chases as they benefit from the amazing sound mix and Elia Cmiral’s incredibly dynamic score (even if the temp score becomes embarrassingly obvious in places – cough Mission Impossible cough lol).

It’s probably safe to say that the sound and music have more to do with my enjoyment of the whole thing than the visual elements, the story, or the acting – that’s even despite the impressive cast and David Mamet being involved (under a pseudonym) in the screenplay. It used to be one of my favourite test DVDs (with T2 and Titanic), the first I’d put into a new player or play through a new hi-fi or speaker set-up. I’m not knowledgable enough to say for sure it’s one of the ‘best’ sound mixes I’ve heard, but it’s definitely one of my favourites – the gunfire sequences get me on edge no matter whether I’m watching on a 5.1 surround system or a little mono TV. And there aren’t many cinematic thrills greater than a car-mounted camera roaming the streets of Paris at breakneck speed. See the end of Roger Avary’s Killing Zoe for an even more satisfying example. This is pretty much the movie I’d like to choose whenever I get round to demoing the new HD technology.

Speaking of Friedkin, incidentally, it’s worth mentioning the number of ways this movie resembles his style. There’s a clear nod to the French Connection chase scenes towards the end of the movie, and being the movie geek I am I couldn’t help but notice the similarity between a staircase at the end of the movie and the infamous “Exorcist Steps” in Georgetown. The whole style is very Friedkin too, though. It makes me genuinely regret that John Frankenheimer didn’t get to finish his work on the Exorcist prequel before passing away.

I was watching this with my stepdad and between us I think we came up with the best summary of the movie – it being not the easiest of stories to follow, consisting of a flawless macguffin, mindbending turns to rival the first Mission: Impossible movie and (probably / therefore) multiple plotholes … I honestly still can’t follow it 100%, but that’s part of the fun. Noticing the brilliant cast includes Sean Bean and Jonathan Pryce, both ex-Bond villains, I realised that really this movie seems to be essentially a 007 story without James Bond. Though we’re made to side with De Niro and friends, pretty much everyone we see here is a criminal to some degree. Basically, MI6 just hasn’t got wind of all this yet. Thankfully, they solve it amongst themselves by killing each other. Poor old James, though … not needed anymore, lol.

Then there’s the whole theme introduced by the title of the movie. The opening credits roll and you wonder if you’re in the right movie. The music, the title fonts, it’s like a bone fide samurai flick from the 60s. This all fits into the whole scheme of things in the movie, but again, I can’t articulate a decent explanation. It annoys me that this movie is now 8 years old and even when I first saw it I knew there was heaps to explore, and I still haven’t quite got round to it. There’s a lot of mythology involved in the story – in fact, if anything, a lot of the time, it’s almost too perfectly constructed if you’ve read Joseph Campbell and Syd Field – but I’d have to argue that while there’s no shortage of movies that follow the old tried and true rules of story and screenwriting and myth, etc, there aren’t many in the past 10 years that do it with as much class and intelligence as here, and there’s definitely a place for it in my world.

And hey, if none of that babble convinced you, let me promise you … anything with Natascha McElhone in is worth a look. I think she was the sole reason me and Gareth went to the cinema for it in the first place after The Truman Show introduced us to her. I was gonna post a picture of her here, but on consulting Google images I discovered that there aren’t any decent pics of her … it must be a motion thing, but I assure you … she’s flesh-meltingly beautiful.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 26th, 2006 at 11:31 pm in 4 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.